Sweepers

by P. T. Deutermann

  He shrugged. “That wouldn’t be difficult, I guess. It was well known in my professional circles that Galen Schmidt was my sponsor when I went up for flag.” He paused thoughtfully. “You’re right: It’s a reach. I can understand his being able to discover Elizabeth. But I can’t see an exenlisted man knowing about the inner workings and hidden Mechanisms of the flag-selection process.”

  She thought about that for a minute. The waiter came by and the admiral raised his eyebrows in her direction, but she shook her head. He did the same and asked for their tab.

  “But just suppose,” she said, “just suppose that Admiral Schmidt became a target of opportunity, that Galantz has been planning and plotting for a long time, but that part of the plan was to murder Elizabeth, and then see what you did. And when you went to Galen, especially the night you got the warning letter, the admiral became the next target.”

  She watched as he thought this through, but then he surprised her. “If that’s true, you’d better start watching your back,” he said. “And I guess we’d better have another sitdown with the Fairfax cops. I hate to say it, but maybe they better take another look at Galen Schmidt’s heart attack.”

  She felt a chill of apprehension as Train’s words of warming echoed in her mind. She had been with Sherman when he visited Elizabeth’s house.

  And at the church. And at the restaurant. And someone had made the phone call to bring in the police when the admiral found the syringe. She looked up. He was watching her intently. She tried hard to keep her face composed, but either Sherman was being stalked or he had to be the killer. But why?

  She shuffled the service records in front of her. “We have to ask the police where that nine-one-one call came from,” she said, stalling. “The one summoning a cop car to that parking lot.

  “Yes indeed.”

  “But only if the syringe and what was in it was important, I I she pointed out. “I mean, it wasn’t likely that the cops would have arrested you for doing dope in the parking lot, an admiral in full uniform.”

  He considered it for a moment. “So maybe we were not the focal point of that phone call?”

  “Right. It may have been the syringe.”

  He shook his head in exasperation. “We’re going in circles. I guess we’re just going to have to wait to see what the cops come up with. I think we should try to meet with them again, say Monday. No, not Monday.

  Galen’s funeral is Monday afternoon in Annapolis. Tuesday, then.”

  “I’ll call Mcnair Monday. I’ll ask about the source of the phone call, and what’s come back on the syringe.”

  He nodded, then looked at his watch. “Is von Rensel working this?” he asked, pointing to the records.

  “Yes. I spoke to Admiral Carpenter this afternoon.”

  A trace of alarm went through his expression. “You spoke to Carpenter?”

  Karen wished she had not brought that up. “Yes, sir. I had to in order to get NIS tasked. Officially, that is.”

  “I see. And I suppose he wanted to know what’s behind the Galantz story.”

  She hesitated, not knowing how much to tell him about the conversation in Carpenter’s office. “Yes, sir. I … I told him that you were concerned about this story getting out the public sensitivity.”

  Sherman gave her a long look and then sighed. “Okay, I guess there was no way around that. Thanks for trying.”

  “He said he would respect your wishes to keep this closehold,” she said, lying.

  The admiral smiled again. “Sure he did. Well, I guess we’ll see. I’m still not used to the idea of Galen’s being gone, which is more important than my professional worries.

  Anyhow, the weekend cometh. I don’t suppose the police will be working this over the weekend.”

  “Should I call if something comes up?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Oh, you can always leave a message. But I’ll be out of town until late Sunday. If you have anything to report, call me at home Sunday, why don’t you?

  Otherwise, I’ll be in the Pentagon Monday until about eleven hundred; then I’ll be headed down to the Academy for the service.” He paused. “Do you want to come to the service?”

  She was taken off guard. “Well, I-“

  “It’s going to be a pretty big deal. The CNO and most of the bigs will be there. Full military honors. CNO’s office is handling the arrangements.” He paused. “It’s just that things seem to be happening when you and I are together.”

  She must have assumed a strange expression, because he was suddenly backpedaling. “That didn’t come out right, Commander. Karen. What I meant was-“

  It was her turn to smile. “I think I understand, Admiral.

  If someone is watching us, we might be able to see who it is if we make the effort to look.”

  “Yes. That’s what I meant. If that makes you nervous-“

  It seemed to her that he was the one being nervous. “I have a suggestion,” she interrupted. “Let me see if I can get Train von Rensel to come along, too. He keeps reminding me that he’s the trained investigator. He might see something we don’t.”

  He stood up. “Good idea. Let him see this record, and that picture. It’s old, but it’s a start.” She stood up as well and gathered her purse. The admiral continued. “Maybe we ought not to tell the cops too much about von Rensel. Let him work the web independently. If he and NIS can ferret out Galantz, perhaps we can take care of this problem inhouse.”

  She thought about that as they walked out of the lounge.

  “Well, I think that’s a good idea, up to a point. I mean, Mcnair knows he’s in the picture. And we already told them we’d try to get some NIS help. But if Train can get a line on Galantz, then we probably need to let Carpenter decide when to bring in the police.”

  “Of course,” he said quickly. “Let me call us a cab back to the Pentagon. Then I’ll walk you to your car.”

  SUNDAY Late Sunday morning, Karen was reviewing her tax forms when the light of the beautiful spring day streaming through the study windows overwhelmed all her good intentions and drew her outside. She walked down to the barn and spent a few minutes talking to Sally, but then the extension phone in the tack room started ringing. It was Detective Mcnair.

  “Commander, good morning,” he said. “Sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but we need to find Admiral Sherman. No one’s answering at his home, and a patrol car reports his car’s gone. Any ideas?”

  “He’s out of town. Let’s see, he told me he’d be away until this evening, I think. I don’t know where, though. Has something happened?”

  She almost said had something else happened.

  “Well, yes and no. Remember your syringe? The lab report came back on it late Friday. The thing is, we need to get Admiral Schmidt’s body into the ME’s lab. There’s something we need to check out.”

  Karen felt her heart sink. “Don’t tell me: There is a connection between that syringe and Admiral Schmidt’s heart attack.

  “Whoa, now, Commander. You’re getting way ahead of us. We just need to check some things.”

  “Are you talking about doing an autopsy?”

  He paused, as if trying to decide how much he could tell her. “Well, a partial one. Normally when the deceased’s own doc pronounces, we don’t do an autopsy. But we need Admiral Schmidt’s blood type, and a sample, if we can get it. There was human blood and a residue of potassium chloride in saline solution in that syringe.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

  “An injection of the right amount of potassium chloride into a vein can stop a heart. Admiral Schmidt died of a massive heart attack.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re still speculating at high speed here.

  But someone left a syringe in your car, a syringe that hadn’t been cleaned or rinsed out. Almost as if someone wanted us to make this connection. Potassium chloride, Sherman, and the old man’s heart attack.”

  Karen found herself nodding into the t
elephone handset, at a total loss for words.

  “Commander?” Mcnair said at last.

  “I’m here. I just don’t know what to say, other than Admiral Sherman and I had a conversation very much like this Friday night. We were trying to figure out why in the hell someone called into nine-one-one to report a Navy guy doing dope in a parking lot. We wondered if it was really about the syringe and not him.”

  “Well, we pulled that string, too. Asked the nine-one-one dispatchers to check their logs to see where that call came from.”

  “And?”

  “No joy in Mudville. The caller-ID function was disabled because the phone company is changing around all the northern Virginia area codes.

  They’ve been taking segments of the caller-ID system down after nine P.m.”

  Karen was silent again. Damn. So it could have been Sherman making the call himself. Sally stuck her head into the tack room and waved good-bye. She had a folder of show entries under her arm. Karen waved back and then remembered the Galantz records.

  “Oh, we have the SEAL’s archived records,” she told Mcnair. “They came in late Friday afternoon. There’s a picture, although it’s many years out-of-date, and taken when he was very young.”

  “We’ll want anything you can give us. And I think maybe we need to meet again.”

  “Yes, I agree. So does Admiral Sherman. But he wants me to go with him to the service in Annapolis on Monday afternoon.”

  “He say why? Or would that be normal?”

  Karen hesitated, then explained their reasoning, leaving out the fact that Train would also be going along. It was Mcnair’s turn to hesitate.

  Finally, he agreed to the logic, although he seemed to question the prudence of it.

  “Look, Commander, this guy’s stawng Sherman. If that was him calling nine-one-one, then he’s seen you. If he’s bent on knocking off people close to Sherman, he may target you next. He seems to have no problem finding out who’s who.

  “That thought’s occurred to us, Detective.”

  “Yeah, I suppose it has. Well, let me get onto this other problem. If Sherman calls you, can you let him know what’s going on? We’re scaring up a court order to do the partial autopsy. Fortunately, there aren’t any grieving relatives, so we plan just to do it. Hopefully, we’ll beat the embalmer.

  Oh, by the way, there is the outside possibility that the Navy may have to do their ceremony around an empty box Monday.

  “Oh, wonderful. You get to tell the CNO’s office.”

  “Yeah, I know. But we need to schedule that meeting. I don’t like the way this thing’s shaping up. Technically, if Schmidt was iced, this qualifies as a serial kill.”

  “On that optimistic note-“

  He laughed. “Yeah. Right. We’ll be in touch. Watch your back, Commander.”

  Karen hung up and walked out of the tack room and into the empty aisle way, the skin on her back tingling just a little.

  Sally had left, and the horses were turned out. She stood for a moment in the shadows of the aisleway, thinking about what Mcnair had said: “Watch your back.” There it was again. The barn was empty, and the concrete aisleway felt cold and threatening in comparison to the bright rectangles of warm sunlight framed by the doorways at either end.

  She started to walk back up to the house. Where the hell was Sherman? she wondered. Not that there was anything for him to do at this juncture. The police would have the old man’s body taken to the medical examiner’s lab whether Sherman liked it or not. And what if it turned out that the syringe was indeed an instrument of murder? Then what?

  Harry the watchdog was curled up in a black ball by the entrance to the hedge passage, soaking up some sunlight.

  He opened one eye as she walked past, the tip of his tail twitching in greeting.

  Come on, Harry,” she said. “I need some lunch.” But the old dog didn’t move, apparently preferring to soak up maximum heat from the patch of sunlight. She was surprised: The L word usually took priority over anything else Harry had on his schedule.

  “Okay for you, dog,” she said over her shoulder, and then she headed up the path toward the house. She decided to call Train von Rensel.

  Train was roughhousing on the front lawn with two of the Dobermans when Hiroshi appeared on the porch with a portable phone.

  “Who is it?”

  “A Commander Lawrence, Train-sama.”

  Train dismissed the dogs, who scampered off across the front lawn, heading toward the river wall. He wiped his face and upper chest with a towel. After an hour of sword drill in the bright April sunlight, he was ready for a shower. He was surprised to be hearing from Karen Lawrence, especially after the chilly tenor of their working relationship at the end of the week.

  Counselor,” he said into the phone,’plopping down on the front steps. He wasn’t quite sure how to address her.

  First names would have been appropriate after a week in the same office, but they hadn’t really hit it off that well.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t going to call her Commander.

  “Hi,” she said, neatly stepping around the same problem.

  “I’m sorry to bother you on a Sunday, but Mcnair just called.”

  “That sounds ominous. Let me guess: The syringe connects to the old man’s death.”

  “Definite maybe,” she replied. “Mcnair was being coy.

  But they now want to do a partial autopsy. And they want to talk to Admiral Sherman again, but he’s out of town for the weekend. “

  “Official trip? Or personal?”

  “I don’t know. He told me Friday night he was going to be gone for the weekend.”

  “Friday night?”

  “Yes. I went by his office late Friday, with the Galantz personnel files. We went over to the Army-Navy Club for a drink and to discuss next steps.” Train didn’t know what to say to that. Drinks at the Army-Navy Club? How cozy.

  She must have sensed his disapproval. “It wasn’t a date, for crying out loud,” she said. “It was Friday evening. Nobody in his outer office can leave until he does, so we left.

  I don’t know why I’m explaining this to you.”

  “You are absolutely right,” he said

  “You want to socialize with the admiral, that’s your business.”

  “It wasn’t socializing,” she insisted. “We went through Galantz’s record. There’s a picture, an old one, ut at last a picture. The admiral recognized him right away. Oh, and he wants me to go to the funeral for Admiral Schmidt tomorrow. I suggested you also go along, separately. If someone’s watching us, maybe you can spot the watcher.”

  The admiral was wasting no time, Train thought. Take the lady to an emotional scene like a funeral, build on that sympathy. Why was he even wasting his time thinking he might-oh, the hell with it.

  “That’s probably a good idea,” he replied. “What are the arrangements?”

  “I’m not sure yet. The funeral’s tomorrow. I’ll have details in the morning.”

  “Okay, thanks for calling. I’ll see you in the office.” He hung up, cutting her off. He went back out into the front yard. Okay, let’s get squared away here. Forget Karen Lawrence, redhead extraordinaire. Focus on this case. The cops wanted to take another look at the old man’s body. So some badness had turned up in the syringe, which logically would imply that Admiral Schmidt had been helped along to the other side. He had to admit that he couldn’t think of a reasonable motive for the boy admiral to kill his girlfriend and his sea daddy. Okay, so let’s assume Galantz is real.

  He began some tai chi exercises. If Galantz had indeed survived the Rung Sat experience and made it back to the States, then he was not working at Burger King. He’d made the threatening appearance in Sherman’s house in 1972-over twenty years ago. Where had he been for all those years?

  What had he been? Must get to Mchale Johnson, sooner rather than later.

  Sherman called Karen later Sunday afternoon. “Oh, good,” she said.

 
“Have you spoken to Detective Mcnair?”

  “Yes, I have,” he said, sounding annoyed. “it seems the police have been very busy. They’ve taken Galen Schmidt’s body in for an autopsy, and I’ve just had a second call from Mcnair.”

  “He called me earlier. Looking for you. Did they-” He sighed. “I’m afraid so. The remains had been embalmed, and apparently, that makes a chemical analysis almost impossible. But he confirmed that at least the blood type is a match with the. residue in the syringe.”

  “Oh dear. And was there potassium chloride?”

  “There’s a problem with that. Apparently when someone dies, the body’s own cells release quite a bit of potassium into the bloodstream, enough to mask the quantity needed to stop a heart. Their toxicology people are going to try. I think they called it some kind of differential analysis, but it

  “II take some fairly sophisticated tissue studies. Unofficially, the ME told Mcnair it would be a waste of time.”

  W,Karen ‘didn’t know what to say. Now Galen Schmidt’s death was forensically ambiguous, just like Elizabeth Walsh’s. “Does this mean Galen was Uled?” she asked.

  Sherman’s voice betrayed his anxiety. “The blood type matches. Now they’ll have to do DNA matching to see if it’s actually his blood. I have to tell you, Karen, this is beginning to get to me.”

  She could certainly sympathize. “What about the funeral?” she asked.

  “Will they get the remains back to the funeral home in time?”

  “Yes. That’s all back on track. But this other business..

  Karen felt the urge to fill the sudden silence. “Mcnair wants to meet as soon as possible after the funeral, Admiral,” she said. “May I suggest Monday evening?”

  “I suppose,” he said. “Oh, and he asked about NIS. I told them what you said Carpenter said-that NIS was coming in.”

  “Yes, sir. I talked to Mr. von Rensel earlier this afternoon. He’ll be there in Annapolis.”

  “Good,” he said distractedly. Karen wasn’t sure he had even registered what she had just told him. Poor man. He paused for a moment. “Because if the higher-ups try to squelch this investigation, I’m gonna take it public.”